The Wild, Wild Wet
Covering nearly half of our planet, the high seas remain largely unexplored and unprotected.
Through the plays of William Shakespeare, the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the expeditions of Ernest Shackleton, the high seas have for centuries captured the public imagination and the interest of scientists and explorers, who perceived the open ocean as a place for grand adventure and great discovery.
They didn’t know the half of it.
Today we have the kind of technical capabilities and observational prowess that those writers and explorers could only dream about. And yet we still know less about the high seas — marine waters beyond the jurisdiction of any nation, which cover nearly half of our planet’s surface — than we do about the dark side of the moon.
That lack of knowledge, however, hasn’t kept the remote ocean safe from human intervention. We discover new species and ecosystems with nearly every scientific voyage, such as corals that have lived since before the earliest human writing and undersea mountains that dwarf Mount Everest.
At the same time, we also discover that those species and ecosystems are threatened by everything from overfishing and seabed-mining to chemical and noise pollution, plastic waste, ship traffic, and ocean acidification, which is brought on by the same pollution that drives climate change. Being distant and mysterious is no shield against the ills of civilization.
Until recently, there was little to protect the high seas. That started to change this January when, after more than a decade of debate, countries came together at the United Nations to start developing a new, legally binding treaty that will significantly advance the conservation of marine biodiversity in our oceans. Negotiations begin next year, though there’s no clear timeline for completion.
But there’s no time to waste. As we celebrate World Oceans Week, it’s worth remembering what we’re fighting for — biological treasures that would no doubt have lit up the imaginations of history’s great writers and explorers.
As many as 10 million species may inhabit the deep sea — and we’ve discovered only a fraction of them.
Scientists believe the high seas contain perhaps the largest reservoir of undisturbed biodiversity left on earth, including deep-sea corals and sponges that could help pharmaceutical companies create medications to treat cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. Unfortunately, we risk wiping out vast numbers of them before we’re even aware of their existence.
Everest, eat your heart out: The world’s most astonishing mountain ranges are entirely underwater.
Seamounts — underwater mountains that are usually extinct volcanoes — are home to an astounding array of species, some of them found nowhere else on earth. The bad news: Seamounts are also appealing to bottom trawlers in search of new fish stocks as near-shore resources are depleted.
The Little Mermaid could do a lot worse than a cold-water coral garden for a castle.
These brightly colored deep-sea “castles” — some so tall they could reach halfway up the Statue of Liberty — thrive without sunlight up to 6,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. Some are at least 8,500 years old, making them among the planet’s oldest-known living organisms. They are also increasingly at risk from bottom trawling, deep-sea mining, and other exploitation.
This is the dilemma of the high seas — it contains vast riches that we haven’t yet fully explored, or even glimpsed, and yet they are no longer out of range of our exploitation. It’s time to protect some of the greatest treasures left on earth while they are still there for us to discover.
